Prunella Clough 1919 - 1999

By the 1950s Clough had turned her attention away from beachscapes towards the urban environment and themes of labour. The industrial landscape became a source of endless fascination for her, as Britain rebuilt and regenerated itself in the years following the war. She turned her gaze away from the shingle beaches of North Suffolk towards Thameside cranes, lorries on inner city building sites and workers in factories.

Chance encounters with discarded objects in builder’s yards or on construction sites now began to hold her attention. Configurations on a crumbling plaster wall or an arresting shape of an unidentified object outside a factory gate could produce surprising results. Wastelands and urban dereliction provided a series of new shapes, colours and textures and a catalogue of visual information with which to create her paintings. Clough made economical use of colour making it sing out from within the grids and meshes of her painted textures.

The New Art Centre, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Frances Spalding, Prunella Clough: regions unmapped, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2012, p. 131, pl. no. 84 (ill. col.)

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Prunella Clough, September – October 1960, no. 74 (Arts Council); touring to City Art Gallery, York, College of Art, Bournemouth, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge, Art Gallery, Blackburn, Art Gallery, Derby and Camden Art Centre, London, 2015

Shown in her first exhibition in March 1947 at the Leger Galleries, Deserted Gravel Pit demonstrates a transition from the Suffolk beaches towards man-made environments such as quarries or, in this case, a gravel pit. Twisted, red forms and the remnants of unrequired scaffolding, suggesting dreamlike presences, are the only inhabitants of this abandoned landscape. They act as markers of man’s presence, now rusted and corroded by the elements.

I see my subject mainly as landscape, but the kind of landscape I am dealing with is something I cannot match up to…I have the mind of a northern romantic which tends towards the atmospheric…This is maybe the wind and the weather of English, and not just northern, romanticism. (Prunella Clough)

Austin Desmond Fine Art, London
Private Collection, France

The phantom like figure, an industrial worker, is situated – encased, even – within an upper storey warehouse doorway or opening. Courtesy of its almost luminous off-cream aspect this frieze-like figure is akin to a picture within a picture and takes its place alongside other architectural markers, features, and structures – the crane and iron ball to the right, the dark red beam below or textured dark purple-grey walls – to define a raw proletarian scenario. Exhibited at Clough’ s important early solo exhibition, during the spring of 1953, at the Leicester Galleries, Warehouse Crane is typical of the industrial subject matter she favoured throughout the first half of the 1950s. As much as half of this 37 work display depicted lorry subjects, while the rest featured warehouses and cranes – as here – as well as dockyards, disused factories, and telephone engineers. Though a small compositional element, the figure is a crucial narrative symbol, animating an impersonal, mechanical scene and eliciting what Frances Spalding calls a ‘covert sympathy’ . P D.

Redfern Gallery, London
Mrs Winifred Edwards, UK

Leicester Galleries, London, 1953

Benn Levy. UK

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Works by Prunella Clough, April 1953, no. 5
London, Fine Art Society, Prunella Clough, November 2003

Private collection, U.K